"I'm going this very minute," said Hilda.
"And I'm going this very second!" Alicia retorted.
They all three left Janet's bedroom; the new cloak cast over a chair-back, was degraded into a tedious banality--and ignored.
In less than a minute Hilda, hatted and jacketed and partially gloved, was crossing the garden. She felt most miraculously happy and hopeful, and she was full of irrational gratitude to Alicia, as though Alicia were a benefactor! The change in her mood seemed magic in its swiftness. If Janet, with calm, cryptic face, had not been watching her from the doorway, she might have danced on the gravel.
[CHAPTER V]
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
I
She was walking with Edwin Clayhanger up Duck Bank on the way to Bursley railway station. A simple errand and promenade,--and yet she felt herself to be steeped in the romance of an adventure! The adventure had surprisingly followed upon the discovery that Alicia had been quite wrong. "Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," the confident Alicia had said. But Clayhangers happened not to have a Bradshaw. Edwin was alone in the stationery shop, save for the assistant. He said that his father was indisposed. And whereas the news that Clayhangers had no Bradshaw left Hilda perfectly indifferent, the news that old Darius Clayhanger was indisposed and absent produced in her a definite feeling of gladness. Edwin had decided that the most likely place to search for a Bradshaw was the station, and he had offered to escort her to the station. Nothing could have been more natural, and at the same time more miraculous.
The sun was palely shining upon dry, clean pavements and upon roads juicy with black mud. And in the sunshine Hilda was very happy. It was nothing to her that she was in quest of a Bradshaw because she had just received an ominous telegram urgently summoning her to Brighton. She was obliviously happy. Every phenomenon that attracted her notice contributed to her felicity. Thus she took an eager joy in the sun. And a marked improvement in Edwin's cold really delighted her. She was dominated by the intimate conviction: "He loves me!" Which conviction excited her dormant pride, and made her straighten her shoulders. She benevolently condescended towards Janet. After all Janet, with every circumstance in her favour, had not known how to conquer Edwin Clayhanger. After all she, Hilda, possessed some mysterious characteristic more potent than the elegance and the goodness of Janet Orgreave. She scorned her former self-deprecations, and reproached her own lack of faith: "I am I!" That was the summary of her mood. As for her attitude to Edwin Clayhanger, she could not explain it. Why did she like him and like being with him? He was not brilliant, nor masterful, nor handsome, nor well dressed, nor in any manner imposing. On the contrary, he was awkward and apologetic, and not a bit spectacular. Only the wistful gaze of his eyes, and his honest smile, and the appeal of his gestures...! A puzzling affair, an affair perfectly incomprehensible and enchanting.
They walked side by side in silence.
When they had turned into Moorthorne Road, half-way up whose slope lies the station, she asked a question about a large wooden building from whose interior came wild sounds of shouting and cheering, and learnt that the potters on strike were holding a meeting in the town theatre. At the open outer doors was a crowd of starving, shivering, dirty, ragged children, who romped and cursed, or stood unnaturally meditative in the rich mud, like fakirs fulfilling a vow. Hilda's throat was constricted by the sight. Pain and joy ran together in her, burning exquisitely; and she had a glimpse, obscure, of the mystical beauty of the children's suffering.